“I’ve lived my life for art. I lived for love. I lived for joy, to ease breaking hearts with my song.”
NORA YORK (1956–2016) was an adventurous jazz singer and performance artist whose genre-crossing work defies easy categorization. Her concert work Power/Play was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and performed at the 2006 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. York has headlined at the Newport Jazz Festival, Ottawa Jazz Festival, JVC Jazz Festival, New Sounds Live at Merkin Hall, and Lincoln Center Out of Doors, for which she received a “Meet the Composer” grant. In 2013, she received a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant to compose and perform a song cycle as part of Marfa Dialogues/NY, an interdisciplinary citywide series on Climate Change. She won the Franklin Furnace “Future of the Present” grant for her collaboration with artist Nancy Spero and her piece “Bad News!” was presented at the 2013 River to River Festival New York.
York composed and recorded for television shows on A&E, Showtime, PBS, HBO, and “Klimawechsel,” the award-winning television series from German filmmaker Doris Dörrie. She also contributed to four of Dörrie’s feature films, including The Fisherman’s Wife, whose soundtrack was released by Virgin Records/EMI.
In 2005, music historian W. Royal Stokes featured a profile on York in the “Visionaries and Eclectics” section of Growing Up with Jazz, from Oxford University Press. In addition, York’s TED Talk was presented in 2009 and she served as vocal coach for Clive Owen for the HBO series “The Knick.” Her previous albums include What I Want (2005); Alchemy, written with Grammy Award-winning composer Maria Schneider (1999); and To Dream the World (1995).
“Nora York was an absolutely unique artist, one whose commitment to experimentation was matched with a voice of unworldly beauty. She was a great singer, a great artist, and a luminous human being.”
– Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of The Public Theater.
© STEPHANIE BERGER
“Nora worked across genres of music, combining disparate histories and sounds. She remixed music history to create an emotional platform for her intelligent narrative about the world around her. Several writers referred to Nora as a ‘Philosopher Diva.’ Nora’s art is based on her belief in song as a central carrier of our deepest emotions and highest thoughts.”
-Jerry Kearns, Artist and Nora’s Husband